What better image than the sea to convey the idea of
infinity and an actual voyage? And if you then put a
ship in that dark blue sea, gliding along with all the
grace of a swan amidst the foam-spewing waves... As
children of a people that took to the sea rather late
despite inhabiting a geography surrounded by water on
three sides, we should not be surprised that images of
the sea and portraits of ships are rather new to
Turkish painting. The depiction of ships found in
Byzantine mosaics, Greek terra cottas and Egyptian
papyri only developed in the true sense of the word
with the extraordinary advances in the art of oil
painting that took place in Europe from the 16th
century onwards. In the absence of photography, oil
paintings, which aimed to be almost exact copies of
reality, had an important documentary value as faithful
representations of their subjects.

Indeed portraits of ships became a discipline unto
itself in painting of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Since we Turks had no tradition of painting in the
Ottoman period apart from the very limited and stylized
art of the miniature, depictions of the period's
splendid galleys and imperial caïques have not come
down to us in detail. We know these vessels only from
Melling's engravings and the paintings of Ayvazovsky
and Preziosi. While we have long lamented the absence
in the history of Turkish painting of any painters of
the sea or ships other than Diyarbakirli Tahsin, a
fleet looming suddenly on the horizon now looks like
putting an end, to some extent anyway, to these regrets
of ours.

Haslet Soyoz, whom we have always known as a
cartoonist, is coming at us full steam ahead with his
`Ships of Paradise'.

FROM CARTOONS TO OILS

Like many others, I became acquainted with Haslet Soyoz
through his comic strips in the daily papers. The `big'
questions asked by that memorable 'Little Guy' of his
still ring somewhere in my childish head. For some
reason however I was not at all surprised when the
creator of Kucumen, who has never lost those wild
childish eyes of his, came out thirty years later with
a whopping series of ship paintings, perhaps because I
could detect in those giant canvases the signs of a
sensitive soul that still views the world through a
child's eyes.

What, I wonder, lay behind the extraordinary labor and
patience lavished on those ship paintings by Haslet,
who shut himself up in his studio in Tarlabasi for over
two years? Could it be an attempt to turn the old
cliché `the history of these lands' on its head and
write a visual history of our ships and the sea that
surrounds us on three sides? It's not easy to explain
why an artist who spent thirty years pouring his
grievances into the minimalism of cartoon art in black
India ink on A4 sheets has now returned to the canvas
and the rainbow oil palette.

Haslet says the inspiration came with a painting of the
Savarona.

Starting with a painting of this beautiful yacht on
which Ataturk spent his last days was an auspicious
introduction to the enterprise of painting pictures of
each of the ships that left an important mark on the
history of the late Ottoman and the Republican
periods... a long voyage through history on the crest
of the waves and in the wake of the ships.

THE YAVUZ, THE GULCEMAL AND OTHERS

They are all there in Haslet's paintings. The
battleship Yavuz, which sailed through the Istanbul
straits in 1914 to pound the Russian ports of
Sevastopol, Odessa, Kiev and Novorossisk with cannon
fire thereby triggering the First World War, is
proceeding full steam ahead, puffing smoke from its
double smokestack. Right next to it is another legend,
the Gulcemal, an English-built vessel launched on 15
July 1874 with a German name, which was bought by the
Ottoman government in 1911 and renamed for the mother
of the reigning Sultan Resad. This ship, which glides
along on Haslet's canvas like a coy bride with a
profile befitting its name, Rose-faced, is sacred in
the eyes of the Anatolian people, who were convinced of
its powers to heal the sick who surrounded it in boats
in the ports where it anchored.

And what about the frigate Ertugrul, forging ahead in
unfamiliar waters even though the sea is high and the
sky, roiling with blue-grey clouds, is ready to burst?
It only narrowly escaped several disasters Abdulhamid
to the Japanese Emperor.

Now it is on its return voyage. When stormy Japanese
waters off the coast of Kobe swallowed up the Ertugrul
on 18 September 1890, only 69 of its 681 crew members
were saved. Now on Haslet's canvas it pursues its
return course, like a yearning song in the darkness.

THE SHIPS OF PARADISE COME TO LIFE

In another corner stands the Sahilbent, whose story is
little known.

The world's first car ferry, produced in England in
1871 according to plans drawn up jointly by Huseyin
Haki Efendi, director of the Sirket-i Hayriye, the
period's leading shipping company, General Inspector
Iskender Bey, and the head architect of the Haskoy
dockyard Mehmet Usta, the Sahilbent, with its twin the
Suhulet, operated for close to a hundred years between
the two shores of the Bosphorus.

These are just a few of the many ships depicted on
Haslet's canvases.

The Bandirma, for example, carried along by winds of
hope, stoutly resists the Black Sea's fierce waves to
carry Ataturk to Samsun, where he launched Turkey's War
of Independence in 1919.

All these and many more are immortalised on Haslet's
canvases. Haslet Soyoz has breathed new life into these
ships, which put their stamp on the last century of
Turkish history before sinking quietly to the bottom of
the sea when their time came or breathing their last as
they were dismantled at a shipyard. His `ships of
paradise' turn over a new page for us in Turkey's
maritime history.

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